Meet SaaStr’s Most Respected Leaders of 2019. Our most popular CEO, COO’s and Presidents that spoke at SaaStr Annual 2019. Curious how we came up with this list? We found our most popular speakers by speaker views and likes, session bookmarks and ratings weighing categories more heavily for overall rating than initial interest. Using magic (standard deviation) we came up with the best of the best of our sessions as voted by you, our SaaStr community.

Every week we’ll be rolling out new winners until we get to the very pinnacle of our list. Keep your eyes peeled as we unveil the list and a bit more about your favorite leaders.

SaaStr’s Most Respected Leader Awards Number: 10 to 14

 

Nick Mehta Gainsight CEO
About Nick…

Nick Mehta and Anthony Kennada presented on how to create a new category (customer success). He rises to number ten on our list due to the high session average and initial bookmarks by our attendees. Gainsight’s customer success software empowers companies to increase revenue and decrease customer churn.

Nick Mehta’s tenure in tech began as co-founder and VP of marketing for Chipshot.com which he founded in 1998. He then led product management for XDegrees and spent over five years rising up through the ranks at Symantec. From 2008-2012 Nick was CEO of LiveOffice which was acquired by Symantec for $115MM). After a five year stint as a general partner at Acceleprise, Nick landed at Gainsight as CEO where he has been for the last six years.

 

Mikkel Svane Zendesk Founder/CEO
About Mikkel…

According to Mikkel “the cloud’s biggest days are yet to come”, his stories of a time when “the cloud” wasn’t exactly the reality it is today inspired SaaStr attendees to heavily bookmark his session ahead of the event. Zendesk went public under ticker $ZEN on the NYSE in 2014.

Caput A/S, a communications framework company was Mikkel Svane’s first tenure as a founder in 1996. He served as CEO for the company until 2002 before moving on to Materna. Mikkel later founded Zendesk in 2007 while living in Copenhagen, Denmark. He moved the company to San Francisco in 2009. Today, he continues to helm Zendesk and has authored “Startupland” about what it takes to risk it all and ‘go for broke’.


Henrique Dubugras Brex Founder/CEO

About Henrique…

Henrique Dubugras of Brex earned his spot at number twelve with a spike in interest on his speaker views. Attendees were excited to see how this corporate card for tech companies grew from 0 to $1B in under two years and what Henrique learned as a second-time founder.

Henrique Dubugras started coding when he was just nine years old. Inspired by Korean video game Ragnorak, he built his own version when his parents didn’t want to pay for the premium. At 16, Henrique founded Pagar.me, a Brazilian Stripe with co-founder Pedro Franceschi. In 2016 they sold Pagar.me, left Brazil and enrolled in Stanford. Soon after leaving school they launched Brex which currently has over $181M in funding from Y Combinator, DST Global and Greenoaks Capital among others.

 

Jennifer Tejada PagerDuty CEO
About Jennifer…

Coming in at number thirteen, PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada earned top marks as attendees bookmarked her session heavily and highly rated it after attending. PagerDuty was founded in 2009 and recently began trading on the NYSE under ticker symbol $PD this April, seeing a whopping 50% pop in the stock right at open. The company boasts over 10,000 organizations and 350,000 paid users on it’s SaaS incident response platform for IT. You may have heard of a few of their customers: American Eagle, IBM Cloud, Instacart, Netflix, Paypal, and Gap just to name a few.

Jennifer Tejada started her career at Procter and Gamble, one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world. At SaaStr Annual 2017 she shared how selling Sunny Delight would ultimately teach her how to sell software. From P&G, Jennifer became Chief Strategy Officer for Mincom, then President and CEO of Keynote Systems and finally CEO of PagerDuty which she has helmed since 2016. In her first six months as CEO of PagerDuty, the company closed the first half of the year with a 95% increase in enterprise revenue. If running a major SaaS company isn’t enough, she also sits on the boards of Puppet Labs and Estee Lauder Companies.

 

Kyle Porter Salesloft Founder/CEO
About Kyle…

Salesloft’s Kyle Porter saw high marks in the attendees that made their way to his sessions.  His sales focused, actionable content made an impact on the audience. Salesloft is a sales engagement platform that helps companies understand their customers’ needs and respond to them meaningfully. “There is no shortage of evidence on how buying has changed. Customers are more empowered and informed than ever before. This has upped the ante for sellers who will try anything to get through to buyers.”

Kyle Porter is co-founder and CEO of Salesloft. Prior to Salesloft, Kyle began his career as a recruiter,  then VP of Marketing for NanoLumens and finally co-founder of B2BCamp, a conference focused on B2B revenue generating professionals.

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